There was a TED talk that outlined recently why building from scratch is rarely "green". Especially when you're talking about building a big, opulent "green" mansion out in the middle of a posh suburb with a huge acreage.

People (especially the wealthy) may not want to hear it, but the greenest option is to renovate an existing structure in an urban center. Just like buying a used 1992 Honda is more "green" than buying a brand new Prius.

Building new may make you feel better about yourself, but it's definitely not the best option for the environment, by far.

Their computers are all spam servers because they've been infected with viruses.

Users unintentionally running a spam server because of an infected system doesn't exactly bolster your case. :)

if was well designed it would give completly free (both beer and speech) internet to everybody and wouldn't need administering.

Has there ever been a server system that was so well designed and intuitive that it didn't need administering? Isn't that what Microsoft tried with Zero Administration? I think there's a reason unix, with all it's complexities, won out.

I'm not saying it's impossible. But when even the best server management software out there is too difficult for the majority of users, I think it's simply impractical.

I see where he's going with this, and while I expect that certain aspects of the concepts will eventually be implemented in different ways, we have to be clear that the idea of everyday people administering their own servers is just not practical. I realize everyone here sees it as something we're willing to invest our time in, but most people don't. Servers exist for a reason, there are people (called system administrators) who can specialize in making sure the server software you're accessing, your data, etc. all are secure and have 99% uptime.

I'm not the kind of person who thinks that there is a divide between a sort of tech elite and the unwashed masses who will never understand this stuff. I'm one of those people who thinks that even your grandmother can learn how to recompile Apache given enough time, interest and dedication. The problem is that doctors are busy being doctors, plumbers are busy being plumbers, parents are busy being parents, and so on an so on. Even as a software developer, I prefer to not administer my own servers if I don't have to. I have friends who are very intelligent people who are very accomplished in non-computing fields who use virus and adware-ridden Windows machines. I don't suspect they're interested in taking the time necessary to fully secure a server that holds a digital representation of their life.

So this idea of a total peer-to-peer networking is not an approach I think we should pursue, not because it's not technically achievable (it totally is), but because it's not practical on a social level. This is reflected in the difference between Appleseed's approach to open source social networking and Diaspora's: Appleseed uses a federated node structure, and Diaspora claims to use a P2P, although we haven't seen the code yet, this was the original promise, and since the EFF is backing the project, it fits in with what Moglen is suggesting here.

We'll see where we end up, but I worry that if we push for Moglen's approach, we may see a small ghetto of tech savvy users who adopt it, while everyone else chooses to remain with the proprietary systems, because they're just that much less hassle. It makes much more sense to me to push for federated, hosted solutions, so that an ecosystem of servers (administered by professionals) can exist, and users can move freely between them.

Michael Chisari
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

I was at the Federated Social Web Summit this July, and over drinks, I was discussing this issue with other open source social networking developers. I mentioned that I've had a few friends pass who still have a presence on the social web (livejournal, facebook, myspace), and I really appreciate being able to go back and remember them that way. I also mentioned that their parents have access to their accounts, so people would get especially unnerved when that "online now" icon would show up or when they would pop up in a chat list, because their parents were checking or closing out their account.

I had a little too much to think, so I posited the idea of a system which learns, based on what you've posted, how to post like you after you're gone. Not a full representation, but a way to continue to create an impression of you. Less like Sonny from I, Robot, and more like Mal from Inception. A shadow of a person, based on what people remember. Or, more specifically, what the system remembers. Since conceivably, generations born in 2000 and up will live their whole lives on the social web, systems will have a lot of information with which to recreate a person's personality. When I suggested this, someone asked, "Why would I have to wait until I died to use this?"

I won't be coding this into Appleseed, because for now, it violates the "Don't Be Creepy" rule that sometimes people break when building prediction software. But there's no reason it can't be done, which means at some point, someone will do it.

Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

To somebody like my mom that doesn't want to be bothered with updates and interruptions out the wazoo and just user her camera/photos/Facebook, Macs are perfect.

I was using Linux back when Slackware was the best distribution around, I know how to manually recompile a kernel, I've been doing software development professionally since 1998, and I know how to code in multiple languages, from bash scripting to C++. I was frankenstein'ing machines back when graphics cards had jumpers.

I'm what you'd call a "power user", and I wouldn't use anything but Mac OS X. It's one of the most functional and unified interfaces to a pretty solid UNIX core that I've ever used. Nothing comes close.

So tell your mom I said "Hi."

Michael, maybe you could try and get in contact with the diaspora guys (since they're just starting to code and all) so that you can make sure this future is possible (making much more likely for this idea of "open social network" to happen)

There's a summit coming up where all the open source projects focusing on distributed social networking will be getting together to discuss that. Appleseed and Diaspora will be there (along with a bunch more). Should be very interesting!

Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

How fast are you expecting this to be developed?

My expectation, have been there and back again, is around 12 months of full time work for four people. This is until something is stable and usable, not what can be considered a "Facebook Killer". To be feature complete with where Facebook is *right now* will take much longer. This is, of course, assuming that their project has a solid blueprint and plan, which won't require any major rewrites or result in any major fundamental design flaws (like being spammer friendly, for instance).

Appleseed is looking at around 9 months to a year to be (basically) feature complete with Facebook, but we have the advantage of a six year head start on Diaspora. A project like this is a massive undertaking, anyone who's released code can tell you that. It's unfortunate that supporters have gotten the idea that the product that will be out in September will be anything but Alpha quality. The interesting thing is to see how Diaspora deals with it's prospective users getting antsy.

Both names don't make a lot of sense to me.

The names of the project don't have to make sense to anyone except for people running servers, really. Can you tell me, off hand, what a Joomla or a Drupal is? Users of distributed social networking hubs only have to know that lolcatfans.tk and havardalumni.edu are compatible with the broader open social network.

Michael Chisari
The Appleseed Project - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

Work on Appleseed has also been progressing rapidly. In the past month, we've added internationalization, theming, and an MVC+plugin framework. You can see our revised roadmap in the svn:

http://svn.appleseedproject.org/trunk/_documentation/ROADMAP.TXT

Here's my public Appleseed profile using an early version of the new theme:

http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisari

Remote logins, remote friends connections, remote messaging, journals, photos, discussion groups, sophisticated node control, ACL and privacy controls and more are all working, and will be refined in the coming releases, along with all new features like one-click server upgrades, search, micro-blogging, and more.

Michael Chisari
Appleseed - http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

The whole idea of "if you don't want it public, don't put it on the internet" always reminds me of this Onion video:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-users-protect-privacy,14358/

There's no reason that we can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, even in our online lives. Especially from a technical standpoint. If I share some photos with 10 people, and one of those people decides to copy that photo into an email and send it off to 100 people, then that's a social failure, not a technical one. People I trusted betrayed my trust, on a social level.

But on a technical level, I should be able to share videos or photos or journal posts with a small group of trusted people, and be reasonably secure in the idea that only they will see them. That advertisers won't have access to that photo, that an api won't be able to pull the data without permission, etc. There's nothing extraordinary about that requirement, and that it's treated as absurd and unreasonable shows how far we've fallen from a basic perspective on internet privacy.

Open source can fill the gap. Our incentive, as open source software developers, is to provide the best software possible, and to not skimp on important features like privacy and security. We aren't trying to cater to advertisers, or to build empires based on fads and hype. I've been working on an open source, distributed social networking alternative to Facebook (and Myspace and other "walled gardens") that called Appleseed that focuses on strong privacy.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

But most of all, by distributing these services, and allowing users to cancel their profile on one site, sign up for another site, and plug right back into the network they lost, it creates a level of competition so that social networking sites *have* to listen to the concerns of their users. They can't take them for granted. Not just in social networking, if we can continue push for open standards, open protocols, open platforms, etc., it means we have some leverage when a popular service decides to privilege it's revenue stream over the privacy of it's users.

I would never consider asking them for money (although I wouldn't turn it down if they offered :), but I did send them an email right before this storm hit, about working on a common protocol, but they never responded.

"In your CV you state that you are the sole developer for the Appleseed project. Yet elsewhere on your site you state that you are a group of developers. Which one is it?"

I'm the lead programmer, we have people contributing in various ways, but anything that says I'm the sole contributor is definitely outdated, and will be updated soon.

I'm currently the only programmer, but I'm definitely not the only collaborator. I've been working with at least two other people throughout this project, and lately, we've gotten interest from designers (which is good, the default theme needs some serious work!) We have a few people interested in working on translations into German, Spanish, and Turkish, to name a few. And we have always had a lot of interest and feedback from people running their own appleseed nodes.

Plus, the source has been open and available to the public since almost the very beginning, around 2005.

As the poster above stated, I am aware of that issue. Also, the latest tarball is VERY out-of-date. For the past couple years, I've been committing to svn (which is open to the public for checkouts at svn.appleseedproject.org) instead of creating distribution packages.

I'm working on getting an up-to-date tarball package out within the next few days (tonight if I have the time). In the meantime, if you'd like to try it out, you can send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org to get an invite code, so you can test out the beta site:

http://appleseedproject.org/

It was actually more like one year, although I was silently committing to the svn without doing much promotion for the year before that. We just couldn't get momentum going, so at some point, jobs and personal lives took over.

This time around, it's different, though. I have to thank the Diaspora* folks, even if they don't end up coding anything, they've really gotten people to start thinking about open source, distributed social networking. And that's a positive for everyone.

We're trying to raise money the same way Diaspora* did, using a similar website. I don't expect to get as much as they did, but I think it's definitely possible to meet the goal.

http://indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project

The Diaspora* guys certainly have a lot of heart, and now they've got some serious expectations to contend with, but they're really not unique, and there are a lot of projects that are way ahead of them. The idea that they can catch up in a "3-month sprint" makes me skeptical.

I've been working, off and on, on a project called Appleseed, an open source, distributed social networking software that is pretty far along, and already works as a proof-of-concept. I started in 2004, and it's been a big undertaking. There's also projects like OneSocialWeb, and Elgg that they'll be competing with, not to mention all the other smaller projects that may not be out of pre-alpha, but still have more code completed and problems solved than they do at this point.

I wish them the best of luck, and I don't want to begrudge them their success, but having been through what I've done already, I don't envy the task ahead of them.

Until then, I think it's best that people support projects with some code under their belt. If not that, at the very least, a solid plan for what they're trying to build and how.

http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking